Prisoners Film Quotes

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you must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face you must hide the surprise of tasting other men on your lips your mother is a woman and women like her cannot be contained. you find the black tube inside her beauty case, where she keeps your fathers old prison letters, you desperately want to look like her film star beauty, you hold your hand against your throat your mother was most beautiful when sprawled out on the floor half naked and bleeding. you go to the bathroom to apply the lipstick, somewhere no one can find you your teeth look brittle against the deep red slickness you smile like an infant, your mouth is a wound you look nothing like your mother you look everything like your mother. you call your ex boyfriend, sit on the toilet seat and listen to the phone ring, when he picks up you say his name slow he says i thought i told you to stop calling me you lick your lips, you taste like years of being alone.
Warsan Shire
In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration)
Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules I didn’t understand—laundry schedules, inmate appointments with various staffers, crochet permits, and the weekend movie schedule. This weekend’s film was Bad Boys II.
Piper Kerman (Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison)
Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain.
Truman Capote (Answered Prayers)
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.
Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)
Rape culture is a concept of unknown origin and of uncertain definition; yet it has made its way into everyday vocabulary and is assumed to be commonly understood. The award-winning documentary film Rape Culture made by Margaret Lazarus in 1975 takes credit for first defining the concept
Joyce E. Williams
I don't have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn't do it with words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non-dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality—or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it—which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off. There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories—it's always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion. In a sense, what's happening now in films and in popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of rationalism. One wants to break out of the clearly arguable, demonstrable things which really are not very meaningful, or very useful or inspiring, nor does one even sense any enormous truth in them.
Stanley Kubrick
I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.
Martin Amis (The Zone of Interest)
Just about everyone I've ever interviewed has told me that by doing something or other--recovering from cancer, climbing a mountain, playing the part of a serial killer in a movie--they have learned something about themselves. And I always nod and smile thoughtfully, when really I want to pin them down: What did you learn from the cancer, actually? That you don't like being sick? That you don't want to die? That wigs make your scalp itch? Come on, be specific. I suspect it's something they tell themselves in order to turn the experience into something that might appear valuable, rather than a complete and utter waste of time. In the last few months, I have been to prison, lost every last molecule of self-respect, become estranged from my children, and thought very seriously about killing myself. I mean, that little lot has got to be the psychological equivalent of cancer, right? And it's certainly a bigger deal than acting in a bloody film. So how come I've learned absolutley bugger all? What was I supposed to learn? I've found out that prison and poverty aren't really me. But, you know, I could have had a wild stab in the dark about both of those things beforehand. Call me literal-minded, but I suspect people might learn more about themselves if they didn't get cancer. They'd have more time, and a lot more energy.
Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)
I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it." "Nine cats? They can send you to prison for that." He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes." "Never heard of them." "They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. Murad means 'desire' in Arabic. The only brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is Murad. There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. If the Murad cigarette is focused upon by the camera in any Cordova film. The very next person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly targeted. In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big X across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
Privately, she was proud of her Oscar for The Big House because she had conquered a variety of obstacles to create a realistic film where for the first time audiences heard prison doors slam shut, inmates’ steps shuffle down the corridors, and metal cups bang on the mess tables.
Cari Beauchamp (Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood)
every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
He was opposed to capital punishment—“institutionalized sadism,” he termed it—and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society.
Gerald Clarke (Capote: A Biography (Books Into Film))
The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20) The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his brow… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior’s continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how he and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. “Up you go!” They lift the cross. God is on display in his underwear and can scarcely breathe. But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye turns brown with rot. His Father! He must face his Father like this! From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes His mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross.Never has the Son seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes. “Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped – murdered, envied, hated, lied. You have cursed, robbed, over-spent, overeaten – fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held a razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk – you, who moles young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end! Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp – buying politicians, practicing exhortation, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves – relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loathe these things in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath? Of course the Son is innocent He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed. The Father watches as his heart’s treasure, the mirror image of himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah’s stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction. “Father! Father! Why have you forsaken me?!” But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply. The Trinity had planned it. The Son had endured it. The Spirit enabled Him. The Father rejected the Son whom He loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished. The Father accepted His sacrifice for sin and was satisfied. The Rescue was accomplished.
Joni Eareckson Tada (When God Weeps Kit: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty)
I wanted not to say things in a letter. But if you don’t feel certain, I’ll tell you. I really don’t know what love means. I don’t feel like they do on the film. But I love you, whether or not. I don’t think much about you, because what is the good. But — ’ here were words scratched out. ‘Nay, what can I say? Don’t let us say things. You are home to me. I don’t care about houses. When I think of you — but I don’t think if I can help it, if a man starts thinking, the fat is in the fire. Everything is a prison, I know that. You are the only bit of freedom I’ve ever had. I never felt free. I’ve always felt cooped in and small, except with you, and with you I’m all right, you open all the world to me. When I think about how you opened to me, nay, I don’t care what happens. But I don’t think if I can help it. We’ve got to live our lives, you yours and me mine. Best never think, something’s bound to happen. And the day will come again, and happen the night, when we’ve got the world to ourselves.
D.H. Lawrence (John Thomas and Lady Jane: The Second Lady Chatterley's Lover)
Those who saw the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai will remember the absurd zeal with which the English officer, prisoner of the Japanese, strives to build an audacious wooden bridge for them and is shocked when he realizes that the English sappers have mined it. So you see, love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue.
Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved)
In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.
Kingsley Amis (The Old Devils)
The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. Is it Reinhart’s? Is it Thistleton’s? Or is it yours? Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
Bongo and Shug seen what was going on and decided to smash holes all over the roof of the hall, just for something to do. Bongo was first on to the roof, where, unknown to him he was being filmed from a cell in the hall straight across from him, but Bongo didn’t give a fuck as he never even wore a mask to try and protect his face, he was in his element, so was Shug. And to their credit, they didn’t half wreck the roof of the hall.
Stephen Richards (Scottish Hard Bastards)
In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
Olivia Laing (The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone)
The Scorsese Principle Hold attention with visual images that illustrate a story. I think most who have seen Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas remember the scene of Paul Sorvino thinly slicing a garlic clove with a razor blade in prison. That visual illustrated the gourmet lifestyle his wiseguys were living even behind bars. Through your words, craft stories that are so engaging that the listener is hanging on every detail. Direct the film that plays in your listener’s mind.
Bill McGowan (Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time (How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time Hardcover))
To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald.” Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: “You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too.
Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
Political power is small, although from outside it can seem very large. Economic power is much more important, as is the power of media communication. They are true powers. What does political power do? Changes the laws. And what effect does that have? It's very relative. We know very little about how many laws are adhered to, and if they are followed what effect that has. We have to manage to create a change in attitudes and changes of attitude are obtained more through campaigns, through attitudes that set an example, than through laws, through sanctions etc. A change in attitudes of communication, cultural change, has an absolutely unstoppable effect. I have lived in a Spain when if you were gay you would be thrown in prison. Realistically, they haven't especially changed the laws, until we cleared up the possibility of marriage, but at the start of the democracy gay people were thrown in prison. The law barely changed but people's attitudes did. It was in films, on television, it was in novels, it was examples - gay people who came out of the closet, they were kind, we loved them; there was a change.
Manuela Carmena
There was something about her playing ... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.” He frowned. “But it’s quite common, isn’t it? What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off. Marriages mangled. Wives left for dead. Children growing up as deformed prisoners of war—all of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they’re fighting for. Extreme wealth, like the kind Cordova married into, only magnifies the size and scope of the fallout.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
In The Shawshank Redemption, there's a short scene between Andy and Red that reveals the difference in their points of view. After almost twenty years in Shawshank Prison, Red is cynical because, in his eyes, the concept of hope is simply a four-letter word. His spirit has been so crushed by the prison system that he angrily declares to Andy, 'Hope is a dangerous thing. Drives a man insane. It's got no place here. Better get used to the idea.' And it is Red's emotional journey that leads him to the understanding that 'hope is a good thing.' The film ends on a note of hope, with Red breaking his parole and riding the bus to meet Andy in Mexico: 'I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
Syd Field (Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting Paperback – November 29, 2005)
And an iron curtain descended around the Archipelago ... Millions of miles of barbed wire ran on and on, the strands crisscrossing one another and interweaving, their barbs twinkling gaily along the railroads, highways, and around the outskirts of the cities. And the peaked roofs of ugly camp watchtowers became the most dependable landmarks in our landscape ... [T]hey were not seen in either the canvases of our artists or in scenes of our films ... A secret instruction was circulated ... Reduce the number of prisoners ... because there was simply not enough housing, clothing, or food ... The chiefs of convoy began to test the accuracy of machine-gun fire by shooting at the stumbling zeks ... The prisoner did not know what barracks he would be in on the morrow ... He went wherever they drove him ... And in some camps they began to isolate the 58's (political prisoners) from the nonpolitical offenders in compounds guarded with particular strictness ... put machine guns up on the watchtowers ... 'The fascists,' as a nickname for the 58's, was ... very much approved by the chiefs ...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right. I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife: An unforgettable true story, now a major film)
Punishment cells were set up in the two-story cathedral ... Poles the thickness of an arm were set from wall to wall and prisoners were ordered to sit on these poles all day ... one's feet could not reach the ground. And it was not so easy to keep balance ... the prisoner spent the entire day just trying to maintain his perch. If he fell, the jailers jumped in and beat him ... Every little island and every little hillock of the Archipelago had to be encircled by a hostile, stormy Soviet seascape ... Escapes multiplied ... For half a year the sea was frozen over, but not solidly, and in places there was open water, and the snowstorms raged, and the frost bit hard, and things were enveloped in mists and darkness. And in the spring ... there were the long white nights with clear visibility over long distances for the patrolling cutters ... it was only when the nights began to lengthen, in the late summer and the autumn, that the time was right ... for those who were out in work parties, where a prisoner might have freedom of movement and time to build a boat or a raft near the shore ... and to cast off at night ... and strike out at random, hoping above all to encounter a foreign ship ... The whole long history of the Archipelago, about which it has fallen to me to write this home-grown, homemade book, has, in the course of half a century, found in the Soviet Union almost no expression whatever in the printed word. In this a role was played by that same unfortunate happenstance by which camp watchtowers never got into scenes in films nor into landscapes painted by our artists ...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings;1 that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath;2 that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims. Was it only that explosion of atavism which is now evasively called “the cult of personality” that was so horrible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation)
Tommy, Ewoks suck. They’ve always sucked and they always will suck. Four has Peter Cushing in it. If in doubt, always go with a film that has Peter Cushing in it.” Petra appeared to be very smug in her victory. Tommy looked mortified. “But six has Jedi Luke and that awesome bit with the Emperor at the end.” “And Ewoks,” I said. “Who, I’m pretty sure I pointed out, suck.” “And to think I was going to get you your own lightsaber,” Tommy said in mock outrage. Petra’s face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. “You have your own lightsaber?” Tommy nodded. “Two of them.” “Why?” Kurt asked. “Why do you need a lightsaber? What can you possibly use it for?” “I think the question is,” Tommy said, “why wouldn’t I need a lightsaber? And as for what I can use it for, I use it to look awesome. Really, really awesome.” “You just don’t understand, my dear,” Petra told Kurt. Kurt didn’t appear to want or need to understand anytime soon. “So, you got beat up by some humans and a witch,” Tommy said, barely containing his laughter. “Do you have CCTV?” he asked Petra, who chuckled. “Are you both done?” I asked. They nodded in unison. “This witch used a huge amount of magic on me,” I informed them both. “To use runes to drain my magic is one thing, but an effete curse is a whole other league of power. That’s a decade of her life, right there.” “I don’t understand why anyone would ever use a blood magic curse,” Tommy said. “It’s not like it’s fun for the person casting it either.” “What do you mean?” Petra asked. “There are several different blood magic curses you can cast on another person, and a few you can cast on yourself,” I explained. “All of the curses do various things to the person they’re cast upon, but the caster has to take some of the curse back onto him- or herself. So, in this case, Sarah cast the effete spell, making me exhausted and utterly useless, but a small portion of that will bounce back onto her. How long was I out?” “Six hours,” Kurt said. “If I’d cast that spell, I could have expected maybe three or four hours of exhaustion. Witches are basically human, so she’s going to be about as much use as a chocolate teapot, for the best part of a day. It was a huge decision for her to make.
Steve McHugh (Prison of Hope (Hellequin Chronicles, #4))
The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.
Cari Beauchamp (Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood)
Her gaze darted back to the computer screen. THIS IS YOUR CALL TO ACTION. If she posted this, it needed to be real. She needed people to believe Spartan could come back. They needed to trust that he'd made it out of the ship. It couldn't just be fangirl to fangirl, writing Starveil AU's that never really happened. This would be the guerrilla warfare of character ships. The fans would have to reweave the details they had into a new explanation of those last seconds of film. They'd take no prisoners, leave no wounded fans behind. But, as in any war, that meant the intel behind the revolution had to stay secret for as long as possible. Fandom had to believe.
Danika Stone (All the Feels)
The foundries were vast, dark castles built for efficiency, not comfort. Even in the mild New England summers, when the warm air combined with the stagnant heat from the machines or open flames in the huge melting rooms where the iron was cast, the effects were overwhelming. The heat came in unrelenting waves and sucked the soul from your body. In the winter, the enormous factories were impossible to heat and frigid New England air reigned supreme in the long halls. The work was difficult, noisy, mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and highly regulated. Bathroom and lunch breaks were scheduled down to the second. There was no place to make a private phone call. Company guards, dressed in drab uniforms straight out of a James Cagney prison film [those films were in black and white, notoriously tough, weren’t there to guard company property. They were there to keep an eye on us. No one entered or the left the building without punching in or out on a clock, because the doors were locked and opened electronically from the main office.
John William Tuohy (No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care)
Fallout avoid a DUI Lawyer The brutal truth is that this effect swallowing and is surprisingly stiff back. Problems and opportunities caused by drunk drivers are frightening. There is a reasonable demand and good heavy penalties only in the hope of avoiding a criminal. The reality is, sad to say, people that many of us are caught up in their original crimes and facing a big change in everyday life and dangerous consequences. Across the country, low crime rate and reduce contains a number from the understanding of the consequences of the ever more stringent. Privileges rear suspension imprisonment, fines, ignition programs and more are binding on all the possibilities and potential impact. Ideal to this procedure, which is full of dangers and pitfalls, in the sense of finding a positive DUI lawyers to get form? Unfortunately, it may be impossible, and many so-called authorities, the practical experience of the senses, a goat for certain customers. An important aspect is the number of measurements to choose high quality coming DUI lawyers. Breakfast is my way to someone who has experience to fulfill. This means that someone who had the food study drunken 50 penalties. He wanted to try, if someone who works mainly candidates with DUI Lawyers. This special mention of the many methods that come from expected with this film with less destructive. On your own, because you to maintain a professional DUI law towards pace, the situation in other readouts. It seems contradictory, but even if someone switches deftly defended many conditions, but also a person who to stay away from the demonstration says. The demo is the last thing should be, especially if they are responsible for themselves. As an alternative to the other, determine the direction of an attorney who is familiar with the specifics of the work and to help to suspend the license and, hopefully, to inform the prosecution of more than a very low price or misplaced. Sometimes the profits to avoid the interest rate and the term of the hard disk, especially for lawyer’s first area infringer years drunk help of the beautiful region. Other cases are in different directions, which can be implemented, which may contribute to an excellent result. The only way to get the opportunity of a personal imaginary profession rather than receiving. Inevitably, any DUI lawyer to explain myself properly to you from serious sanctions targeting drunken price almost never consumed and protect commitment. Can these days of increased restrictions reduce patrols and even a person consumes also be a number. Whatever complaints taxis, sleeping on the couch or taking a walk on the estate has raised overnight in prisons and the ability to deal with this part of the transaction. Even at a time when the only work in the easiest possible development is still very worrying turning point in history and let yourself.
Steve White
If architectural critics can get people to realize that the everyday spatial world of earthquake safety plans and prison break films--and suburban Home Depot parking lots and bad funhouse rides--is worthy of architectural analysis, and that architecture is everywhere and involves everything, then perhaps we'll learn to stop taking those spaces for granted.
Geoff Manaugh
Like something straight out of a B-grade horror film, a single arm shot up from the dirt, reaching and grabbing as it clawed its way forth from its earthen prison. Ash and Trent watched the monster struggle in silence for at least ten minutes, occasionally exchanging glances. Finally, after all the writhing, the zombie emerged. It stumbled out of its grave covered in dirt and gave an annoyed-sounding groan.
Kait Ballenger (Midnight Hunter (Execution Underground, #3))
We were filming Chamber of Secrets when the Prisoner of Azkaban book came out. True to form I was one of the very last members of the cast to read it, but word reached me that it included a scene in which Hermione gives Draco a well-deserved slap in the face. Cool, this should be fun! I was very into my Jackie Chan films at the time, and was stoked to learn that Emma and I might have to indulge in some on-screen violence when we shot the next film the following year.
Tom Felton (Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard)
The film of life is not always the script in our minds.
Rob Samborn (The Prisoner of Paradise (Painted Souls, #1))
Xi’s management of COVID is today the third rail in Chinese politics—which landed him in prison for eighteen years on charges of corruption.109 Another well-known blogger, former Caijing editor Luo Changping, was detained in October 2021 for a new crime—that of defaming political martyrs—after questioning China’s role in the Korean War in a critical review of the box-office-hit film The Battle at Lake Changjin.110
Susan L. Shirk (Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise)
Eastman Kodak went from its late-1980s peak of 145,000 employees to fewer than 20,000, and filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2012. Polaroid, already struggling with longstanding debt and other problems, got clobbered. Between 2001 and 2009 the company declared bankruptcy twice and was sold three times; one of those buyers went to federal prison for fraud. Polaroid film was discontinued forever in 2008.
Christopher Bonanos (Instant: The Story of Polaroid)
During The Prisoner of Azkaban filming, Tom Felton’s robe pockets had to be sewn shut, as he kept sneaking food onto the set.
Bruno Austin (Harry Potter - The Magical Book of Facts: Over 250 facts you probably didn't know!)
A journalist may think he or she is breaking a story, but the journalist is seldom aware of the hidden agenda behind it. Journalists are often used by cops, politicians, gangsters and film stars to propagate their agenda.
Jigna Vora (Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison)
Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.
Peter James
Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.
Peter James (Dead at First Sight (Roy Grace, #15))
There is a scene in The Black Power Mixtape, a documentary film about the Black Panther/Black Power movement that came out a couple years ago, in which the journalist asks you if you approve of violence. You answer, “Ask me—if I approve of violence!? This does not make any sense.” Could you elaborate? I was attempting to point out that questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
The best stories will come from jail, the people which are in the prison, also and from the victims.
Deyth Banger
One of the factors that drew Himes to Rico was their mutual need for fantasy. Movies especially entranced them. They lost themselves in Hollywood gossip, immersed themselves in movie magazine lore, and pretended to identify with the stars. But it was the films themselves-frequently shown in the prison-that most affected them, evoking images of life outside the walls and at the same time reminding them of where they were.
Edward Margolies (The Several Lives of Chester Himes)
Cultural critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the prison comes in part from representations of prisons in film and other visual media.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
The criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a Nightline television series filmed in November 1999 on location at California's Valley State Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed by Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visited the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for "male contact," and that they therefore welcomed these superfluous gynecological exams. Although this officer was eventually removed from his position as a result of these comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
In Al-Karnak, an Egyptian film produced in the mid-1970s, the leading Egyptian actress Souad Hosni brilliantly exposed what a broken soul would look like, after her character – an aspiring postgraduate student – was humiliated, tortured and raped in ‘Nasser's prisons’.
Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
Luca’s tongue slides into my mouth, slow, drowsy, intoxicating. I hear myself make a little involuntary moaning noise, and I’d be embarrassed to my core if he didn’t echo it almost immediately, his hands cupping the back of my neck, his fingers caressing my skull now, as I caressed his. It’s the most delicious feeling. Everything is exploratory; everything we do seems to feel better than the last thing, which was as wonderful as I thought it was possible to feel. I run my hand around his neck to the collar of his shirt, slide my fingers under to feel the skin I can’t see, impossibly smooth, and one of his hands joins mine, covering it, to move my palm even farther under his shirt, at the open neck, sliding it to cover his collarbone, his skin so warm above and below mine that I gasp, and he does too. “Violetta,” he whispers into my mouth. “Violetta, cosa mi fai?” I open my eyes just a fraction, to peep, and see his are still closed, his lashes trembling long and black on his cheeks, silky as his hair. There’s something thrilling about seeing him like this, so carried away, when he doesn’t know I’m looking; it feels illicit, almost like spying on him. And I’m obviously not a very good spy, because I linger too long, watching his closed eyelids, a vein pulsing in his forehead, the color in his cheeks, like a wash of pink under the smooth pale skin, like blood seen through fine china. Luca senses something, perhaps that my attention has drifted from kissing him to watching him kiss me; he pulls back, his eyes flutter open, their blue shocking against his white skin and black lashes. “Oh!” he exclaims crossly, the sound that Italians make a lot, and is actually more like saying “O!” because there isn’t an h in it, and their mouths round perfectly when they’re saying it. “Non è giusto! You look at me! Cattiva!” “What does ‘cattiva’ mean?” I ask. “Bad,” he says instantly, shaking his head in disapproval. “You are bad.” Our knees are pressed tightly together; we’re mirroring each other, leaning toward each other from the waist. And I stare at Luca, his face titled at just the same angle as mine. It really is as if we’re looking into a mirror, or like a film I saw where one lover visits the other in prison, and though there’s a big sheet of glass between them, they place their palms in exactly the same spot on the glass, as if they’re touching, the closest they can get. “You look so sad,” Luca says very softly. “Come mai?
Lauren Henderson (Flirting in Italian (Flirting in Italian #1))
There’s something thrilling about seeing him like this, so carried away, when he doesn’t know I’m looking; it feels illicit, almost like spying on him. And I’m obviously not a very good spy, because I linger too long, watching his closed eyelids, a vein pulsing in his forehead, the color in his cheeks, like a wash of pink under the smooth pale skin, like blood seen through fine china. Luca senses something, perhaps that my attention has drifted from kissing him to watching him kiss me; he pulls back, his eyes flutter open, their blue shocking against his white skin and black lashes. “Oh!” he exclaims crossly, the sound that Italians make a lot, and is actually more like saying “O!” because there isn’t an h in it, and their mouths round perfectly when they’re saying it. “Non è giusto! You look at me! Cattiva!” “What does ‘cattiva’ mean?” I ask. “Bad,” he says instantly, shaking his head in disapproval. “You are bad.” Our knees are pressed tightly together; we’re mirroring each other, leaning toward each other from the waist. And I stare at Luca, his face titled at just the same angle as mine. It really is as if we’re looking into a mirror, or like a film I saw where one lover visits the other in prison, and though there’s a big sheet of glass between them, they place their palms in exactly the same spot on the glass, as if they’re touching, the closest they can get. “You look so sad,” Luca says very softly. “Come mai?
Lauren Henderson (Flirting in Italian (Flirting in Italian #1))
History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
IN 1943 POLISH SOLDIERS TRAINED AN ADULT brown bear to help them fight Nazis in an old monastery atop a mountain in the Italian Alps. Yes, this is a true story, not the plot of the next Pixar film. The bear doesn’t sing or dance or talk, but it does carry artillery shells, take baths, and smoke cigarettes, even though smoking is really bad for you. Voytek the Soldier Bear’s story starts back during the German blitzkrieg against Poland at the very beginning of the war. As the Nazis were crushing their way through western Poland, the brave Polish defenders suddenly felt the stab of a knife in their back when the forces of the Soviet Union came rolling across Poland’s eastern border, eager to grab land for the USSR while the Polish were preoccupied with getting punched in the head by the German Army. One of the few, outnumbered defenders who stood his ground against the Soviet juggernaut was Captain Wladislaw Anders, a resolute cavalry officer who valiantly launched a charge against Soviet troops but was wounded in battle and taken as a prisoner of war. For over a year he rotted in Lubyanka Prison, one of Stalin’s worst and most inhospitable one-star prison facilities. Then a weird thing happened. On August 14, 1941, the Red Army guards unlocked the prison cell and told Anders he was a free man. The Germans had invaded Russia, and now the Soviets were prepared to offer Anders and 1.5 million other Polish citizens their freedom if they’d help old Uncle Joe Stalin battle those big evil Nazis. Anders cocked an eyebrow. He wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of trusting his life to the men who had just shot and imprisoned him, but he agreed anyway. He was shipped out by rail and reunited with twenty-five thousand other Polish soldiers who had been similarly released from the Soviet prison system. Anders immediately
Ben Thompson (Guts & Glory: World War II)
Ten shockingly arty events What arty types like to call a ‘creative tension’ exists in art and music, about working right at the limits of public taste. Plus, there’s money to be made there. Here’s ten examples reflecting both motivations. Painting: Manet’s Breakfast on the Lawn, featuring a group of sophisticated French aristocrats picnicking outside, shocked the art world back in 1862 because one of the young lady guests is stark naked! Painting: Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), depicting a teacher fondling the private parts of a nude pupil, caused predictable uproar. The artist claimed this was part of his strategy to ‘make people more aware’. Music: Jump to 1969 when Jimi Hendrix performed his own interpretation of the American National Anthem at the hippy festival Woodstock, shocking the mainstream US. Film: In 1974 censors deemed Night Porter, a film about a love affair between an ex-Nazi SS commander and his beautiful young prisoner (featuring flashbacks to concentration camp romps and lots of sexy scenes in bed with Nazi apparel), out of bounds. Installation: In December 1993 the 50-metre-high obelisk in the Place Concorde in the centre of Paris was covered in a giant fluorescent red condom by a group called ActUp. Publishing: In 1989 Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses outraged Islamic authorities for its irreverent treatment of Islam. In 2005 cartoons making political points about Islam featuring the prophet Mohammed likewise resulted in riots in many Muslim cities around the world, with several people killed. Installation: In 1992 the soon-to-be extremely rich English artist Damien Hirst exhibited a 7-metre-long shark in a giant box of formaldehyde in a London art gallery – the first of a series of dead things in preservative. Sculpture: In 1999 Sotheby’s in London sold a urinoir or toilet-bowl-thing by Marcel Duchamp as art for more than a million pounds ($1,762,000) to a Greek collector. He must have lost his marbles! Painting: Also in 1999 The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting by Chris Ofili representing the Christian icon as a rather crude figure constructed out of elephant dung, caused a storm. Curiously, it was banned in Australia because (like Damien Hirst’s shark) the artist was being funded by people (the Saatchis) who stood to benefit financially from controversy. Sculpture: In 2008 Gunther von Hagens, also known as Dr Death, exhibited in several European cities a collection of skinned corpses mounted in grotesque postures that he insists should count as art.
Martin Cohen (Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition)
Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary.... When Netta awoke this morning she was aware that she was feeling decidedly sick and giddy, that she had a ‘head’: but she did not relate her ‘head’ to the night before – to the fact that she had got drunk. Nor was she capable of connecting her present feeling of illness with the future: she had no idea of preventing a recurrence of such a feeling by making an attempt not to get so drunk again. She simply suffered it in a vacuum – as a habitual crook, who spends his entire life in and out of jail, suffers prison bars.... The same dull, fish-like style of thought which she brought to bear on the local exigencies of-life characterized her attitude to her existence generally. She was not without ambitions; she was steering a course of a sort; but dimly, without any fervour or coherence. She had at one time hoped to make good at films: she still vaguely hoped to do so: but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty. That was how she had got whatever jobs she had in the past, and that was how her frigid, inelastic mind conceived of getting them in the future.
Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square)
The prison restaurant, just outside the barbed wire, is a big local draw, both for the built-in gimmick of being staffed by prisoners, as part of their culinary training, and for the quality of the food. Today there’s a popular local TV show filming here, interviewing officers stationed by the ladies’ room and hungry patrons devouring noodles. At the table, doily place mats, quilted pink menus, and matching pink chopstick holders mark each seat. Waitresses in pink dresses, sporting those same affectless looks I’d faced all day, take our order and place spicy papaya salad and pad thai before us. Next door the gift shop sells prisoner-made goods and also doubles as a massage parlor. Rifling through pillows, place mats, and purses embroidered with little Thai girls at the playground, trying to determine if making purchases would constitute supporting the prison system or, instead, the efforts to reform it, I spy one more framed royal photo. There’s the king’s nephew, pants rolled up, enjoying a foot massage from an incarcerated trainee.
Baz Dreisinger (Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World)
We went to Arizona to film the interiors of Stir Crazy in an actual prison. From Tucson, where we all stayed, it was an hour-and-a-half drive to the Arizona State Penitentiary. Sidney used real prisoners as extras. They had all been cleared by the prison authorities to work with us, and each prisoner was paid for every day he worked.
Gene Wilder (Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art)
What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off. Marriages mangled. Wives left for dead. Children growing up as deformed prisoners of war—all of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they’re fighting for.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)